♫♪ Bambara - “Filled Up With Night”

Only one thing could draw my attention away from Life of Peder this morning, and that was the a sound so strong it made me think I smelled the crispy bacon cartilage of my ears burning. Songs like this make me want to pinch and tip back into a dunk tank full of sharks and losing lottery tickets. Thats oblivion: a garden that encourages constant tending.

“A few years ago when I was writing some of this stuff, if I was wasted trying to stumble home from a bar and I didn’t know where the fuck I was,”

I love being reminded of how bleak and meaningless the modern grind is almost as much as your girlfriend loves going to sleep in the black t shirt I wore every day out of four adding up to a year, secreting alcohol from my pores until they eroded rat holes in the cotton. I love a bleak song almost as much as I love the feeling of chattering teeth, chunky and invisible but tangible like the crush of bodies, stray hands, wisps of angel hair in your mouth in the center of the circle pit.

“look up at the sky and would always see Orion. I always felt like he was hunting me or something.”

Bambara are a Brooklyn via Georgia outfit, twins Blaze and Reid Bateh plus William Brookshire. Some southern names to match that gothic charm. A little birdie told me they’re touring with Algiers. That’s rad. If we could use anything right now, (not like you asked, but) it’s a lot less Brooklyn, and a lot more two-headed Beasts of The Southern Wild invading our dive bars. Reid and crew have cultivated some demonic bloodbuzzers on their upcoming album Swarm, with “Filled Up With Night” providing a bach-arching orgasm of miserable string-grinding at a swift gallop before the album’s much quieter, breezier half. Just kidding – it crushes all the way through. Swarm is a deceptively focused work though. Check out the squirming exorcism of noise they recording during a long intermission in 2014. They play the tightroper between these approaches – melodic and destructive – extremely well, and have been doing it since 2010’s Dog Ear Days. You can pre-order Swarm before it’s April 1st release day over at Arrowhawk records.